In the Blink of an Eye: The Augenblick of Sudden Change and Transformative Learning in Lukács and Benjamin

Abstract

Although much work dedicated to clarifying the link between learning and change has made a sincere effort to show how change can be a part of the learning process of every individual's life, the progressive functionalist approach to understanding this link in developmental psychology has created a blind spot when it comes to a consideration of the possibilities of sudden change. Developmental approaches to understanding change are also evident in macro‐level politics, and they have increasingly become part of other spheres of social life such as education where the individualized inculcation of skills has come to define the progressive mantra of learning and telos of schooling.

Instead of remaining within the confines of liberal progressivism or functionalism that advance a notion of transformation in gradual, piecemeal, and developmental terms, change needs to be re‐conceptualised to account for the ways that learning can be a momentous, sudden, and sometimes violent event. To this end this article discusses temporal, sensory, and perceptual change through use of the concept of ‘Augenblick’ – a German term connoting a fleeting moment of time normally associated with a form of sight. Focusing on the theories of education inherent in the work of Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin this article demonstrates how micro‐ and macro‐ forms of expressions of the Augenblick occurring at not only the individual, but also the social level in the context of revolutionary politics force us to rethink the ways that the dominance of liberal conceptions of learning prefigure the horizon of the possibility of change.

Notes

¹ For an example of how transformative learning is posited as a form of new‐age holistic morality see O'Sullivan, Morell and O'Connor (2002).

² This question is reframed by Adorno (1998 [1959]: 100) in the context of wondering how education would be able to contribute towards ensuring that the past horrors of the Holocaust remain present in a way that diminishes the possibility of a return to fascism.

³ For an account of how Benjamin conceived of the ways in which learning takes place in childhood see his essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1986a [1933]: 333–36). In this account his conception of childhood learning is similar to the position argued by Gould above where attention to the body in childhood/adolescents gives way to the dominance of the mind in adulthood.

⁴ This is similar to what Jacques Rancière (1994) and Panagia (2000) call the ‘untimely’. Rancière is referring both to an illegitimate and unaccepted form of time that is unbound from the dictates of a conception of history that only acknowledges and is able to identify that which it can causally predict.

⁵ I owe the use of this term to Michael Lowy (2005: 44).

⁶ There is a much larger discussion here regarding the similarities and differences between Sorel and Benjamin in terms of their respective understandings of myth, violence, and politics. However, for the sake of this essay, I only wish to refer to a few of the more important similarities that contribute toward clarifying the ways that a theory of transformative learning exists within Benjamin's conception of divine violence.

⁷ Another example is arguably the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement).

⁸ I would add that this aspect of the movement clearly differentiates it from the vast history of state focused revolutionary struggle in Latin America over the last century. By ‘becoming’ I do not mean to imply that the Zapatista struggle is based on an avoidance of accomplishment, but rather that their idea of accomplishment intentionally lacks any sense of finality, remaining at all times vigilant against the potential institutionalisation of its political aims.

⁹ An example of what Jacques Rancière would call a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ where politics is identified as the disturbance in the previous aesthetic division of the sensory realm (that is, ‘the police’) by those (the indigenous of Chiapas) who had no part in the ‘perceptual coordinates of possibility’ within the context of Mexico (2005: 3).

¹⁰ This situation is perhaps most identifiable in the development of the F.A.R.C. – the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

¹¹ What is striking about the accounts of Zapatista violence from the early days of the movement is their pronounced lack of cruelty. The initial confrontation between the EZLN and the Mexican army in 1993 took place at a federal army barracks in the Lacandon Jungle six months before the official appearance of the Zapatistas. As the EZLN made its way toward the barracks they announced to the soldiers there that they had a decision to make: they could either immediately desert the barracks and flee unharmed, or they would be killed (Castellanos 2008). The exact same choice was provided to all of the targets of the EZLN, including land owners and city police, throughout the 12 days of war between the EZLN and the Mexican army which began on 1 January 1994. By all accounts, even in the case of the EZLN's 1994 kidnapping of the violently racist, former governor of Chiapas, General Absalón Castellano Domínguez, there was a clear lack of cruelty involved. Castellano Domínguez and generations of his family were renowned for innumerable acts of torture, kidnapping and murder of indigenous peasants across Chiapas in the protection of the more than seven million hectares of the state's richest farmland that belonged to the 19 ‘families of Chiapas’ (Ross 1995). Instead of torturing him or possibly even executing him, the Zapatistas symbolically sentenced him to spend his life carrying out hard labour in indigenous villages, eventually leaving him to live the rest of his days with the ‘shame’ of having been pardoned and let go by the same people whom he and his family had ruthlessly killed and plundered for more than a century (Ross 1995).

¹² Similarly, in a 1960 speech, Che Guevara states:

The first recipe for educating the people is to bring them into the revolution. Never assume that by educating the people that they will learn, by education alone, with a despotic government on their backs. The only emancipatory pedagogy is the self‐education of the people through their own revolutionary practice. (Quoted in Lowy 2007 [1973]: 125)

Because the liberated territories that make up the Zapatista autonomous municipalities physically operate at a remove from the state, they are inherently anti‐statist. Their education is not the product of an institutionally oriented administration of knowledge, but rather the general cultural life that is their revolutionary practice of autonomy.

¹³ As Balibar himself is quick to point out, this is not all that dissimilar from the famous arguments made by Althusser (1971) and Bourdieu (1977) on education that primarily critique how institutions operate in the ideological service of the capitalist state.